The Recovery of Beauty

About this book

The Recovery of Beauty comprises fourteen essays exploring what constitutes beauty across time in Western thought and art, its shaping and sustained cultural role, and its relation to a fully human existence. The book engages with the need to rescue beauty, not just to keep alive traditions of thought, but also to reinstate beauty as something more than a shifting cultural construction, to probe its constants and its value. Many of the essays engage with the cultural history of beauty and of its recovery, exploring the development of conceptions of beauty across time, the ways in which tensions are inherent in cultural understandings of beauty, the differences and continuities between past and present ideas of beauty, and the intersection of the aesthetic with the moral and spiritual. Literature provides a particular focus, but the book engages too with medicine and cosmetic surgery, philosophy, theology, visual arts, architecture and dance. Recurrent themes are the human need for beauty, its links to truth and understanding, and also its deceptive dangers. Finally, the book asks: does beauty have a restorative or healing agency?